Driving in a State Park

[lydamorehouse]

When Mason was 15 he got his learner's permit like most of his friends and then.... we utterly failed to learn to drive. I don't know what it was exactly, but it was a bad combination of my nerves, his nerves, and my tendency to be intuitive rather than practical when giving instruction. Whatever the reason we failed the first time, we've decided to give it another go.

Not to jinx anything, but this time it seems to be going swimmingly.

Part of it is that Mason is older and much more confident. Another part is that I am fully letting him set the pace. He recently graduated himself to lonely roads and I had the brilliant idea to drive to a State Park.


The St. Croix River from the Wild River State Park

This was a two-fer, as I got to see a State Park and Mason got in some really, really good practice, since we met  a bit of on-coming traffic (but of course it was all at 20 mph.) Mason even managed to safely stop in time to see...


Picture is blurry and taken through the window of the car, but fawn and adult deer in the road.

The fawn was so leggy that it was doing that awkward, could have been new born, WHAT ARE LEGS?? thing and then immediately collapsed in exhaustion once on the other side of the road and safely hidden by trees. Soooooo cute!

We mostly drove, but we checked out the whole park out, and I was surprised by this little gem. There were a number of people innertubing and otherwise enjoying the water, there's a huge section where the park rangers are restoring the prairie (and have been since the 1970s), and I presume some hiking to enjoy, though we never really stopped this time. I'm thinking this might be a fun park to return to, actually. 

Comments

[pameladean]

This is one of my all-time favorite parks, but I had not considered it for driving practice!

P.

[lydamorehouse]

You say that about all the state parks. ;-)

[pameladean]

I don't! Tettegouche is SCARY. P.

[lydamorehouse]

Okay, I was only teasing (you know how people say, "you say that to all the [girls/boys/people]... *wink,*) but now I have to know. What's wrong with Tettegouche? I feel like I've been, but maybe I missed something important!

[pameladean]

Oh, sorry, I did get the joke, I'm just bad at using emojis properly, or really at all. Also there was some movie or TV show in my remote childhood in which someone said to someone else, "Aw, you say that to all the girls," to which the person addressed very solemnly said, "I would never say it to X."

Tettegouche is probably not too scary to people more physically and mentally robust than I am. But it has very few trails marked "easy" or the next step up. I think this is true of Temperance River as well, but at Tettegouche there's a lot of bare rock that is slippery after it rains, and that seems much more vertical than the bare rock at Temperance River, which I've scrambled around on without terror. Tettegouche was established to preserve a good big example of the North Shore Highlands biome, and it's just very much up and down, up and down, scramble and then skid, scramble and then skid.

Also the nature of the forest keeps changing as you go north, and for whatever reason, at Tettegouche the percentage of evergreens seemed to darken everything, providing a larger sense that one was being watched or stalked.

It's a gorgeous park, packed with waterfalls. But my personal favorite bit was actually the piece of the Superior Hiking Trail just outside the park boundaries -- you cross a highway, and there is this kind of enchanted area where the only trees are a bunch of young paper birches and an occasional clump of perfectly gigantic and probably ancient arbor vita trees. A little moss-covered stream meanders through, crossing the path repeatedly; wildflowers grow near moss-covered rocks, birds flit and sing, and the view is just increasingly crowded white birch trunks and fluttering leaves. Eric correctly surmised -- we looked it up later --that there had been a major fire from which only the ancient arbor vita had emerged unscathed -- they were mostly growing in and among great heaps of granite, which might have meant less undergrowth to burn, or acted as a firebreak -- and the birches were so uniform because they had all sprouted at the same time when the fire was done.

The light was amazing. I took photos, but they are mere reminders, not recreations.

P.

[lydamorehouse]

Though our relationship is largely parasocial, I suspect I would truly enjoy wandering in the woods with you.

And, your description makes me understand. I will say I immediately felt that sense of how dark evergreens close up to a trail or road can make a person feel... in the presence of slightly malevolent Ancient Ones? Watched? Because the first time I visited Shawn's hometown (Grand Rapids, MN,) and the evergreens grew up tall, almost blocking out my sense of the sky, and right up next to the highway my first impression was, "What the heck, you grew up in Mordor!" She was not amused, and I later learned to love it? So, there is that.

I should add, for context, that I grew up in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, among the rolling hills of the Driftless Zone, so sky and a sense of ever expanding distance is a big sense of comfort for me.

[pameladean]

I think I would enjoy it too, and I think you probably would if you weren't in a hurry. I guess the verb "wandering" implies that to some extent.

Oh, I hear you about your experience in Grand Rapids. I had a similar one in Binghamton, New York, where I landed for graduate school after growing up in Illinois, Missouri, and Nebraska, and going to colleget in south-central Minnesota. We used to drive to Winnipeg for KeyCon some years ago, and I alternately annoyed my fellow travellers and convulsed them with hysterical laughter by crying out, "Look how flat it is! You can see all the way to the horizon!"

As for the Driftless, I learned about it only in the last ten or fifteen years, but it's so gorgeous. The slanted ranks of bluffs just marching along, some tree-covered, others with a crazily-slanted goat prairie overhead; but none so tall you can't see a lot of sky. And entire farms up on top -- they look so narrow, but it's an entire other world up there. And farms down between bluffs, way way down, with creeks (coulees?) running down to them and making ponds.

P.

[sartorias]

That fawn is such a darling!

[lydamorehouse]

I thought about trying to get a better picture by either getting out of the car or rolling down the window, but I decided that it was more fun to just be in the moment and watch!

[rachelmanija]

AWW FAWN!

I didn't learn to drive till I was 25, but that was because when I got my permit at 15, my father decided to teach me.

[lydamorehouse]

Yes, I can see how having a parent teach is not actually GOOD. I'm just really glad that this time around Mason and I are BOTH less stressed out?

I am kind of assuming that I'm really only laying foundation. He will probably end up learning more from friends. Our DMV is so far behind that he probably won't be able to test at the end of this summer, so... who knows when he'll actually achieve the license part?